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An in-joke or inside joke is a joke whose humor is clear only to those people who are in a group that has some prior knowledge (not known by the whole population) that makes the joke humorous.
This group of people could be, for example:
- a nuclear family or (parts of) an extended family
- people of the same vocation or profession
- residents of a particular town or region
- students and/or alumni of a particular college or university
- viewers of a particular television series or cult movie
- readers of a particular book or series of books
- users of the same computer or computer software (see easter egg)
- members of an Internet forum or virtual community
- a group of friends or work colleagues
- practitioners of a particular craft, art, or science
- geeks, nerds, and fanboys
In-jokes sometimes appear in film and television. Such jokes may be visual (for example, a movie theatre marquee shown in the background of a scene might display the title of one of the film director's other works), or delivered in dialogue. In-jokes can also take the form of homages to other films or television series.
Examples
- Scientist jokes
- Typos introduced by the typo fairy: Professional editors and writers
- Story ideas coming from a mail-order business in Schenectady, New York: Science fiction authors (this in-joke was started by Harlan Ellison)
- The Wilhelm scream: Movie sound technicians
- Letting out the magic smoke: Electrical engineers
- The Invisible Pink Unicorn: To many atheists, it symbolizes what is seen as the absurdity of believing in a higher being.
- Steven Spielberg served as executive producer for Gremlins and Back to the Future. The same backlot set was used to represent the cities in both films, and features a theater marquee with the titles "Watch the Skies" and "A Boy's Life," which were the respective working titles of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
- Clarus the Dogcow - Macintosh developers
- Every online community seems to accumulate its own in-jokes. On Slashdot these include hot grits down the pants, Natalie Portman, and "first post!" On MetaFilter they include pancakes, "we have cameras," and "this X, it vibrates?"
- The term "Guru Meditation" for users of the Amiga computer system. (A reference to an unusual message when the system crashed).
- A movie reviewer in an article about humor stated that many of the sight gags in the Woody Allen film Bananas are hilarious to anyone who lives in the New York City, but were basically unintelligible to people who have never lived there. (He reported he found many of the gags hilarious, but other people not from the New York City area didn't get them.) This may be a similar effect to much of the humor in the U.S. television show Seinfeld.
External Links
"In-joke"